Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Mar 29;13(3):e0195036. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195036. eCollection 2018.
We test the hypothesis that prehistoric Native American land use influenced the Euro-American settlement process in a South Carolina Piedmont landscape. Long term ecological studies demonstrate that land use legacies influence processes and trajectories in complex, coupled social and ecological systems. Native American land use likely altered the ecological and evolutionary feedback and trajectories of many North American landscapes. Yet, considerable debate revolves around the scale and extent of land use legacies of prehistoric Native Americans. At the core of this debate is the question of whether or not European colonists settled a mostly "wild" landscape or an already "humanized" landscape. We use statistical event analysis to model the effects of prehistoric Native American settlement on the rate of Colonial land grants (1749-1775). Our results reveal how abandoned Native American settlements were among the first areas claimed and homesteaded by Euro-Americans. We suggest that prehistoric land use legacies served as key focal nodes in the Colonial era settlement process. As a consequence, localized prehistoric land use legacies likely helped structure the long term, landscape- to regional-level ecological inheritances that resulted from Euro-American settlement.
我们检验了一个假设，即史前美洲原住民的土地利用方式影响了南卡罗来纳州皮埃蒙特地区的欧洲裔美国人的定居过程。长期的生态研究表明，土地利用遗产会影响复杂的、相互关联的社会和生态系统中的过程和轨迹。美洲原住民的土地利用方式可能改变了许多北美的生态和进化反馈以及轨迹。然而，关于史前美洲原住民土地利用遗产的规模和范围，仍存在相当大的争议。这场争论的核心是欧洲殖民者是在一个“原始”的景观中还是在一个已经“人为化”的景观中定居。我们使用统计事件分析来模拟史前美洲原住民定居对殖民土地授予率（1749-1775 年）的影响。我们的研究结果揭示了废弃的美洲原住民定居点是欧洲裔美国人最早宣称和定居的地区之一。我们认为，史前土地利用遗产是殖民时代定居过程中的关键焦点节点。因此，局部的史前土地利用遗产可能有助于构建由于欧洲裔美国人定居而产生的长期的、景观到区域层面的生态继承。
